Indie Box One is a Personal Web Server, But Home-based Hosting Has Drawbacks

Many people are understandably concerned over outside companies handling their data, and a new crowdfunding campaign is hoping to make it easier for them to take their text, images and videos into their own hands.

But contrary to a network storage device, Indie Box One is designed to serve content to the wider web, and provide an easy platform for web applications such as WordPress for blogging, Owncloud for storage, and Idno for social networking. Indie Box One will also provide periodic offsite backups in encrypted form to Amazon S3 or Glacier.

Running a web server from home, however, isn’t as simple as having the right hardware and software. Many Internet Service Providers don’t allow people to run servers from home, and many have poor upload speeds. So, many Indie Box One users might just use it as a home media server that they can access remotely through a VPN.

With this obstacle in the way, it doesn’t look like Indie Box One will be replacing hosting services for many web-facing applications.

Also, to assure users that their data is safe, Indie Box One will have to ensure that its software can stand up to hacking attempts. It’s not always safe to assume that data is safe just because you can see the device that’s hosting it, and there are plenty of off-premise services that enforce strict security and encryption policies.

It would be interesting to see something like Indie Box One use MESH networks to connect local communities outside of the wider internet, which is something that helped people communicate when the Egyptian government blocked Internet access.

Another major issue with Indie Box One, from an economics perspective, is that it’s an inefficient use of hardware. Virtualization has allowed servers to be shared between many different users and applications. And while it’s certainly possible to have different applications running on Indie Box One to fully use its resources, a cloud provider is able to more efficiently assign resources so that less hardware is used, and less power is consumed.

But overall, Indie Box One is a very important project in that it helps people (who may not have a technical background) better understand how the internet works by running their own server. And projects like Indie Box One are undoubtedly going to be a major part of how we deal with a society where we increasingly have to take our own security and privacy into our own hands.

About the Author

David Hamilton is a technology journalist and Contributing Editor of the WHIR. Based in Toronto, David has covered the hosting industry internationally for the WHIR with particular attention to innovative hosting solutions and the issues facing the industry. He has written for the National Post and other news outlets, and is a graduate of Queen’s University and the Humber College School of Media Studies.

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3 Comments

I think you're right that there are already options such as Mac Minis that are already going up against things like Indie Box. I think there's certainly room to create something new and different - with a greater focus on security - but I'm not sure if Indie Box is different enough from these competitors yet.

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